“Thank you,” he said.
He stepped in via the steel door frame and nodded to the armed guard sitting at the desk on the other side. He followed the corridor deeper into the building. The halls were empty, white, cold. His hard-soled shoes made clicking noises on the gray tile. He pushed a steel cart in front of him. One of the wheels squeaked as he rounded a corner.
At the end of the hall, Stanley pushed open the thick double doors. He stepped into the nursery chamber, and the lights came on automatically. He donned a sterile mask and gloves. He put on the white smock and tied it behind his back. Then he backed through the doors and entered the inner incubator.
It was hot and bright and humid.
Stanley’s purpose today was to draw more blood. He checked the vial seals, unclipped the syringe, then inserted the tip of the needle. The organism lay silent through the procedure. It was small, shiny, black. Information about the creature was need-to-know, but Stanley was no idiot. He knew what he was looking at, even after all these years. The differences were significant—the wings were vestigial, the feet twisted into little shovels. The teeth were small and fine, and pointed out of the head in different directions. But the similarities were also significant. It looked like the gladiator in the old news clips, only smaller and twisted. It was a stunted thing—a distortion—but there was no mistaking what it truly was. There was no mistaking it for anything else.
It had been more than five years since the Helix lab fire, but as far as he could find, nobody had heard of this organism’s existence before six months ago. It had come out of nowhere. This perhaps was not so surprising, considering that, officially, it still did not exist. But he’d heard rumors. He’d heard the thing had crawled out of the bushes that had grown up around the abandoned Helix site. In another version, he heard the thing had been found by a groundskeeper, or something like that, in the ruins of the lab itself.
They were likely rumors. Exactly the kind of likely and believable rumors that will often seep into the void created by an absence of fact. There was no reason to think either rumor might be true … other than the idea that the creature had to come from somewhere. The rumors provided at least possible, if not plausible, explanations. But sometimes even made-up stories happened to get it right.
Regardless of where it came from or how it came to be in the lab, the fact remained that it was a fascinating biological specimen.
The creature almost never ate, and another team was still working on how that was possible. It was dormant, comatose.
“Hibernating,” one team had called it. But most creatures did not hibernate at 95 degrees.
There was much he didn’t know. But he was the blood man. That was his territory. And the blood had its own story to tell. The blood, it turned out, was emphatic.
He’d tested it several times now.
The organism in front of him was a living, breathing gamete—a step in the life cycle that functions with only a single set of genes. It was haploid—no different, genetically, from either a sperm or an egg.
Everything had changed in the last five years. So much had been lost. The new, young scientists freshly minted from the genetics schools were now faced with an odd situation: the golden age had passed them by. Gods no longer walked the earth.
Specialists had tried to reconfigure what had happened after the fire. But everything was lost. The blood and tissue samples were burned to nothing. Helix Labs had been an isolated, centralized unit. Everything was kept on-site, with very little outsourced to other labs. When the place burned to the ground, everything had burned with it. All its secrets. All but this one.
The top scientists in the country had been working for the last six months to unravel the complexity found within the little black-skinned organism that lay before him now. They’d done CAT scans and X rays and genotyping, and as of yet, the attempt had been a complete failure. The results explained nothing. The thing was a relic from a past golden age. A reminder of greatness lost, like the Pyramids of Egypt.
The organism carried more gene sequences in its haploid configuration than most species did as diploids. It had more genes than it could ever use. It was a vessel.
When the blood vial was full, he snapped the seal closed and placed the vial in a plastic container. He loaded up his cart and wheeled it out of the incubator. He shut the door. He took off his smock and his gloves and his mask. And then he turned and walked away.
Walking away was the easy part. Forgetting was another thing. He still had dreams sometimes about the little creature. Other times he couldn’t sleep at all. What kept him awake at night was this knowledge: the organism was a gamete. A single haploid set of genes. It begged a question, of course.
What would happen?
What would happen if they ever found another one?
Like a sperm and an egg coming together, what would they make?
To my mother and to my father
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
There are a great many people on whose guidance and friendship I’ve depended as this manuscript has slowly taken shape. This book wouldn’t have been possible without their help.
Special thanks to the Mean Group, to Michael Poore, Josh Perz, and Marty-Tina Vrehas, who were in the trenches with me from the beginning; special thanks to the HWG en masse; a big thanks to Jeff Manes and Jack Skillingstead, inspiring writers and friends; thanks to my sisters for being there; to Christine for her continuous, unwavering support, even back when it was all just a crazy dream; thanks to all my industry friends over the years—to Tim for working all those late-night double shifts with me and talking books between samples; thanks to Codex, and to Bec, and to all the first readers who slogged their way through multiple drafts. Thanks to Michael Braff, editor extraordinaire; and to Betsy Mitchell and Chris Schluep, for believing in this book in the first place. I offer a special double helping of thanks to my awesome agent, Seth Fishman, who contacted me out of the blue, and without whom this book never would have seen the light of day—sometimes an email can change your life. Thanks to Sheila Williams for buying my first story and making the whole rest of everything else possible; thanks to Gardner Dozois, Jonathan Strahan, and Rich Horton for noticing the short fiction of a new writer. Thanks to John Joseph Adams and to Marc Laidlaw for being there. Thanks to the professor in that one writing class I took who wrote in the margins: “This has potential.” And thank you, Valve, for being the amazing place you are.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
TED KOSMATKA was born and raised in northwest Indiana and spent more than a decade working in various laboratories there before moving to the Pacific Northwest. His short fiction has been nominated for both the Nebula Award and the Theodore Sturgeon Memorial Award. He now works in the videogame industry, where he’s a full-time writer at Valve, home of Half-Life, Portal, and Dota 2.